FreeOrion

I've been meaning to go into this, but here's my impetus:

Geoff the Medio wrote:

eleazar's commit message wrote:created a folder for Silent's special icons. Yes there's already a folder, but 'special' icons should properly go inside the 'icons' folder.

Why is the new location preferred?

The old icons folder is just left over from before there were enough icons to warrant having separate directories for them, as far as I know. Are you assuming or assigning a special significance to the "icons" directory?

First let me describe Wesnoth's art-folder development: In the beginning there was an art folder, and a few general subfolders (much like FO today). As the project grew more art was added, and it became too hard to find things. As art assets are continually being modified, improved, referenced, and added, its important for folks to find things easily. So more subfolders were added, and some assets were moved. Later those subfolders grew too crowded, and sub-subfolders were added, and more art assets were moved around and relinked.

It's really a pain to try to reorganize the art assets of a game in the middle of development. We'd be better off to over-organize our art-folders now into logical folders and subfolders, than be faced with the need later.

It's not very fun to work on a project that has hundreds of folders directly under another, or too many images in any single folder.


So, i'd like to do things this way:

• * No images should be directly under "Art"
  * "Art" contains folders for general but unambiguous categories of images
  * Subfolders under "Art" contains images or sub-subfolders

"Icons" is a pretty distinct class of images, that artists will want to reference off each other. And it will be (one of many) large groups, so images should have their own sub-subfolders here.

What about art file naming conventions?

At present, the tech and building icons are all Title_Case_Tech_or_Building_Name_with_Underscores_as_Spaces.png

Most of the older art is uncapitalized_with_underscores.png

Should effort be made to standardize this, at least within each type of art file? How broadly or specifically-defined is "type" in this context? (ie. are specials and techs both icons, or are the different types of icons?)

Geoff the Medio wrote:What about art file naming conventions?

At present, the tech and building icons are all Title_Case_Tech_or_Building_Name_with_Underscores_as_Spaces.png

Most of the older art is uncapitalized_with_underscores.png

Should effort be made to standardize this, at least within each type of art file? How broadly or specifically-defined is "type" in this context? (ie. are specials and techs both icons, or are the different types of icons?)

That's a good point.

Especially when some operating systems are case-sensative and others are not, it's important to know without looking how something will be capitalized, otherwise errors can creep in which only effect some systems.

In general i favor non-capitalization, because "don't capitalize" is much easier to remember and communicate than any given rules of capitalization. It saves trouble.

For the same reason i wouldn't want to have different rules for different folders. Preferably the same rule should apply to all the files in FO, unless there's a good reason to do otherwise, ie, "default/COPYING".

I'd mostly be happy to have all new files fit the same pattern. After all, all lowercase with underscores, seems to describe most of our files.

While I certainly agree that in general the naming should be consistent, and that it should probably be lower case for portability, COPYING in particular is a standard name for this file (and so should remain as it is).